After Sushil, Vijender gets public land for academy

For a boxing academy, Beijing Olympic bronze-medal winner Vijender Kumar will get 3 acres on lease for huge discount on the campus of Motilal Nehru Sports School at Rai in Haryana's Sonepat district, where India's only double Olympic medal winner, Sushil Kumar, was given space on December 18, 2013. Hindustan Times broke the story on December 17.

The Haryana council of ministers, which had approved 8 acres for Sushil's academy, on Wednesday cleared a fresh proposal of the sports department to change it to 5 acres.

It is on Sushil Kumar Foundation's request that 5 acres would be sufficient, an official spokesperson said here on Wednesday. The Rai school land is leased for 33 years to the London Olympics silver medallist (who also had taken the bronze in Beijing), a railway employee from Baprola in Delhi.

The lease agreement is for Rs 35,000 per acre a year. Also, 50% seats have to be reserved for the Haryana-domicile budding athletes. A committee of secretaries (CoS) constituted to examine the matter had, on the contrary, suggested that Sushil Kumar Foundation be allotted space elsewhere for the academy, since the Rai school was on public land. The cabinet, however, overruled the CoS.

A district-level committee formed for evaluating the land found its collector's rate to be about Rs 95 lakh an acre, based on the price of similar spaces in the adjoining villages. Since the school land was once in the revenue estates of Sewli and Ferozepur Khadar villages, its price was not fixed.

It abuts the land procured for Rajiv Gandhi Education City (RGEC), which Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) had allotted in 2011 to educational institutions for Rs 5,940 per square metre.